Facing the Wave

Supposing our betters (ah) ever let us out of house arrest, and this is not in fact a democrat/green plan to reduce population and bring in the Green New Deal (Yes, it does sound crazy, but you know the saying “When the impossible” (that this virus is really as dangerous as painted) “is eliminated, the implausible must the truth.” things are…. gonna change.

And chill. No I don’t think this is an enviro-weeny plot, but they will be right there along with the happy fun democratic socialists, trying to take advantage of the crisis.

So we too need to know what is coming and be ready to face the wave.

I’ve told you forever that part of the mess around us is because things are changing very rapidly, and humans don’t like that. In our time, the so called progressives — how they can call themselves that without laughing — are the ones most enthusiastically trying to lead us back to the early 20th century, because that was their glory days: unions, mass producing, emphasis on race/class/nationality and a powerful and redistributive state.

This insanity of locking the world’s economies are just another battle in their war against the future. No, I am not saying they created the virus, but boy have they tried to prolong the shut down and the misery.

This is partly because they’re completely ignorant — as in, they’d probably be less ignorant if they’d never learned anything about it, since everything they know about it is things that just ain’t true — of where wealth comes from, and are convinced it’s synonymous with money, and therefore just printing more money will take care of all the actual production lost through this time. It won’t, of course, but on the good side, at the rate inflation is going to hit, we will resolve the toilet paper shortage with dollar bills.

Anyway, here’s the thing: like everything they’ve tried to do, because they really don’t understand people or anything related to people, including how tech influences human society, or that you really can’t put the genii back in the bottle once it escapes, this is going to blow up in their faces biggly (whether they manage to elect a dem-socialist this November with their new, shinny all vote by fraud mail initiative or not is irrelevant. THAT will just prolongue the pain and make life very interesting for a few years, but the end is the same.)

Making predictions, as I’ve said a number of times, is hard, particularly about the future, but some I can make, and they’re not what the dems ever expected from this. (their understanding of second order effects is…. lacking.)

This was coming, anyway. It’s been coming for 20 years. As with ebooks, people heard about it twenty years ago and had since become convinced it would never happen. But you know, just as indie did with ebooks, this is showing people working from home is not only feasible for a lot of people, but they get more done. Even if this is just 20% of the population who can do this for now (there will be more. I suspect the new “made in America” factories will be largely robotic, and supervisors might be states away, working from home, with perhaps one person nearby to turn off the power/whatever. Telemedicine is accelerating through this. So many other things will go this route overtime, particularly with students learning from home, which they already are.) the reverberations will be HUGE.
So, some of what to expect:

It didn’t surprise me that even introverts aren’t finding this the paradise they expected it to be. Why? Well, because, children, elephants and small dragons, humans are a social ape. Even people like me like to see people. And even a lot of introverts need to see different people every day.

Don’t worry about restaurants. They’ll be fine. People working at home NEED to see people after work.

New tele-workers will — by and large. Some of ya’ll are extreme Odds — move to the middle of nowhere. They will instead move closer to town/city. Which is why I’m not afraid of our investment. Houses in our neighborhood are already mostly work-at-home people, and they’re selling at a fast clip still. Yes, during lock-down. (Not that we have a ton of openings.)

Personally? I think when this settles and the percentage working form home in 20 years or so, is more likely to be around 40%, the preference will go to small towns.

How do you attract people to your small town?

Restaurants are part of it, but consider that families need places to take the kiddlets, too, and —

The reason we live where we do is botanic gardens, the zoo and museums (Though museums have been getting too woke for words.) So, interesting things for kids to do, particularly with more homeschooling, might be a thing that attracts young families. Give some thought to that if you have to restart a business. Craft classes for the whole family? Come in and design and make a whole play? Something like dinner/murder theater but involving everyone.

I think the small cities that cash in will be one with opportunities to meet and greet and get to know your neighbors/create a strong community, without the draw backs of big city life. Though mind you big cities will continue to grow. If they remain stiflingly leftist or not? That’s up to you and your personal associations.

In the end I think they don’t, because the left has counted on the conveyor belt of public education and that was hit hard by Winnie the Flu.

2- One of the side jokes of this time period has been UC insisting I retire from teaching early and offering me increasingly attractive packages.

Look, it’s tempting, except I’ve never worked for them. I have no clue what wires they got crossed. I’m also on faculty emails, and that too is kind of …. mind boggling. But funny. Very funny.

Anyway, note that they’re expecting crashing in enrollment, they’re completely terrified of re-opening in Fall (and will remain so, no matter if this comes to nothing, because they think we’ll get it with another “Wave” in fall, and their own propaganda machine — well, that of their ideological friends — makes it sound like the end of the world.)

I know some states are talking distance only learning next Fall.

It’s insane, but it’s also the acceleration of the inevitable. Bringing the kids home will blunt or put an end to a lot of the indoctrination and insanity.

Indoctrination ONLY works if you take up the kids’ day and expose them only to what you tell them. Even if the kids are learning online from the public school site, and from home only? Yeah. They’re still with parents, who will say things like “no, I don’t think it’s that way. I lived through this. Tell them what they want but this is the truth.”

Fifty percent of kids will get almost no education of any kind, of course. This, weirdly, might make it better than now. Because it’s long been my contention letting the kids waste their time might teach them more than our failing inner city schools. And maybe some of you can find a way to provide a place for kids to be while they learn? And supplement/value add to this?

But again, the kids and the adults will want to socialize after school/work. HUMANS ARE SOCIAL APES. This will probably mean that everywhere, pretty much, neighbors will get to know each other, and a lot of things will become more neighborhood-based.

This isn’t bad. We’re going to see the mass-media lose a lot more power at the end of this tunnel.

3- All of this will lead to more self-sufficiency, and to a linking of effort and outcome. Remember that these are things that don’t favor the left.

Also when models and “scientific expert governance” blow up in their faces, there will be a general souring of their favorite boondoggles. Climate change? yeah, we’ve seen pretty graphics before. Etc. This won’t end well. For them.

Already the money feeding their grifty “foundations” is drying up. It’s going to be very tough come next winter. But that’s just a price to pay for sanity returning.

I’m still wondering what happens when China money dries up, and how many more masks will fall.

4- Illegal border crossings are at an all time low, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. All border crossings are at an all time low, and somehow I don’t think that will change greatly.

The future is very much one with borders. The EU might limp nominally a few more years or decades, but it’s now functionally dead. People have seen the insularity behind the “open borders” crowd, and the risk for everyone.

This very much spells the end to international socialism. Not national, but that — well, that has to be dealt with. We’re not out of danger, but the internationalist insanity is fading, and with it the culture of the West should return. Or at least sanity should return to it.

Yeah there are large unassimilated populations in every Western country, and vast, not to say painful, insanity left over from indoctrinating the last 3 generations on political correctness.

But the next winter will be hard, and hardship restores sanity like a cold bucket of water restores sobriety. The problem is it will get ugly. Very, very ugly.

Stay with it. Work with it, so we don’t fall into the — leftist — insanity that only genetics count. Work to make sure people understand Fit In or Fuck Off. In America, work to be American. In Europe, I don’t know. Europe was always blood and soil….. it’s going to get massively ugly.

5- Remember the enemy gets a vote.

It’s been obvious the left has already ordered their Hugo Boss uniforms for the new police state for a while now, and it became worse during the shut down.
Don’t let them. Sure, talk and work against unconstitutional restrictions and debasement of individual rights, but above all, ignore them.

There is a vast wave of change about to crash down on the entire world. For a lot of countries this is very, very, very bad. A lot of countries in the third world are going to be in horrible shape, and we’re going to be too busy with our own issues to help.

Yes, there will be wars and millions of lives lost because the first world lost their minds and decided hiding under their beds for fear of a virus was a good idea.

But the world after that is not all bad. One thing we know about the “progressives” is that they can’t deal with change or with being the stick-out individualist.

Sometime in my early teens I got a mailing from a very, ahem, eccentric religious group. I think. I have no idea why, and this was in the late 60s when you had to work to make a mailing list. At any rate they were hawking a self-published book meant to teach you all the Hidden Signs of the coming apocalypse and the chapter heading that stuck in my mind was, “The Danger of the Picture Phone!”
And now, here we are. I thought at 13 it was nonsense and nothing I’ve seen since has convinced me otherwise.

In the 1970s Carol Burnett did a himarious skit about video phones; how women would have to check their hair, makeup, and outfits before answering the phone, and keeping the camera turned away from anything they didn’t want their interlocutor to see.

It might have run that way, except few people seem to use phones as audio any more, much less video. They expect to leave voicemail or send a text; live communication isn’t part of the “phone experience” any more.

My Dad was in his 80s and embraced the “voicemail” thing wholeheartedly; he quit answering his phone entirely. You had to leave a message, and he’d listen to it at his convenience and call back if he felt like it. So I couldn’t just call and see he if wanted to do lunch; I had to drive to the next county and bang on his door. Meanwhile, he was in his 80s and lived by himself; I was listed as next of kin. I was stuck with the phone 24/7; there was no “let the machine catch it and maybe I’ll check it later” on my end. Which is one of the reasons I’m mildly phobic about the things now that he’s gone.

I remember a short SF story about the introduction of “video phones” and all of the fun-and-games associated with them. Prank Phones calls where the caller would “just laughs” at the person who answered. People getting business calls where they didn’t want their bosses/co-workers to see how they looked at home. And so forth. In the story, the promoters of the “video phones” finally decided that the “video phones” weren’t for “the average phone user”. 😉

I also saw a Jetson cartoon where George witnessed a phone call (via video phones) between his wife and one of her friends. The friend sneezed and her “false face” feel off. George laughed at it until his wife took off her “false face”. 👿

Ghost in The Shell: Man-Machine Interface had a humorous take on the cyber-video call. Motoko is in such a call with someone who looks like her secretary, and during the call the secretary goes through her morning bathroom routine, while her phone avatar self looks office-ready in the little circular floating holoscreens. There is one panel where she is also seen as she really is, so I am not sure if it’s because of Motoko’s being able to bypass the virtual mask, or a feature.

The best decision I ever made in college was to join the improv group. Two meetings a week for four years (well, most of them; I had other things going on the spring semester of my senior year.) I was never one of the players in the shows we put on, but that didn’t mean I didn’t learn a whole lot of skills.

The most important one, in regards to this, is to drop your preconceptions. Stop worrying about “the way it’s supposed to be”; start from where you are. So many people spend time lamenting how “it isn’t supposed to be like this” and ignoring the actual facts on the ground. Have goals, absolutely. But you can’t get from here to there if you think that “here” is off to the side.

That was Toastmaster’s for me. Went through entire program + little extra before I had to drop it. Didn’t make me comfortable about giving speeches, but I can do them without fainting, or upchucking, and generally, now the walls stand still …

(With Border Collie, there’s the “I gotta go potty” bark, and the very similar “My big sister has to go potty” bark. The BC isn’t adverse to getting in trouble to help out her big sister. OTOH, she (the Lab-Aussie) has her own set of whines if the BC isn’t close by.)

I really need to put this into a separate file so I don’t have to dig it out every time:

[from Gordon R. Dickson’s “The Last Master”]

“You realize,” said Maea crisply, “that you’re talking about the sort of conspiracy that would be too large to keep under wraps.”

“Not necessarily,” broke in Rico. “Bureaucrats in a working system don’t need to conspire. They’re like spiders sitting at points on a community web. If one of them starts doing something for the good of the web, it’s because conditions seem to call for it—and those same conditions will also move other bureaucrats, whether they know the whole story or not. It’s as if the vibrations travel along the strands of the web, and the rest of them, following their nature, start doing what must be done-all without any direct spider-to-spider communication whatsoever.”

Of course, even if it’s sub-rational, it doesn’t mean they aren’t dangerous.

Plus people who are stuck at home, with a significant other of the opposite sex, are gonna have babymaking on the mind. Not everybody is going to use birth control, have the birth control work, or abort the kids. I mean, kids are kinda nice, and most people agree on that.

Update from Iowa– there were a lot more gaps in the frozen section, but it stuff you’d use to make an Easter brunch buffet at home on the cheap.

Saw a lot more face masks, but saw massively more people out walking around, and a lot more shoppers.

I think folks are about ready to get pissed about being locked down every harder because a couple of people a day are dying– it’s to the point that even the news is mentioning it’s largely in nursing homes.

Similar letter posted over the eggs in our local grocery. No chicken, no (unsmoked) pork, not much beef.
Interesting comment re Iowa – if the virus was here in January, why didn’t it pop up in Iowa and New Hampshire? All those campaigns, travelling all over, tons of physical contact, considerable older populations…it’s another mystery.

Eggs took off this week. A month ago, an 18 count carton of eggs at the big independent cost $1.98 for an Oregon brand. Yesterday, $2.98. I’d seen an article (zerohedge, maybe) warning that the shift to more consumer foods (mac & cheese, *cough*) was going to put pressure on egg and chicken supplies. OTOH, they said that beef and pork were in good shape right now.

Caught an interview with the Iowa pork spokeslady on the way home, she was saying that folks are doing a LOT of cooking with pork right now, probably because it reheats so nicely. (Unstated, it’s relatively cheap, and it’s not chicken.)

Beef producer the other day was mentioning that the ethanol guys being down was hitting the feedlots that buy byproduct from them pretty hard.

We might have to get used to grass-fed beef, though at home, it’s more chicken and pork. Not-so-red meat is better for my body, especially since I’m off Ibuprofen until I get another clotting time test.

I wonder what (if any) lasting effects this might have on the ethanol-laced gasoline market. Illinois was primarily a feed-corn growing area, and the post-harvest process should still be around for non-ethanol use. (I rather like the idea of growing corn to use as food rather than burning it, but I’m radical that way.)

The complicating factor is that ethanol percentages are set by legislation, and they’re the result of both ag and enviro lobbying. Ethanol is a very poor choice as a fuel, having a low energy density, narrow flammability range, poor ignition characteristics, and it’s both hygroscopic and extremely corrosive. Modern cars use plastics, stainless steel, and lots of software tweakery to be able to handle ethanol contamination without affecting driveability and reliability too much, but the flip side is your fuel economy goes down and your cost goes up.

If ethanol supplies were to grow short, you’d have refineries sitting there with tanks full of good gasoline they couldn’t legally sell because the legally mandated contaminant was not available.

It depends on how long the imposed recession lasts. It’s probably more likely that the market for ethanol will go south, rather than the supply, at least until people start driving again. (I’m assuming that we’re not doing a real life imitation of the Last Centurion, complete with 2020 and froze-to-death.)

If there’s a glut of ethanol, then what? I think the green lobbies are going to see more pushback as more people see just how well modeling [anything] doesn’t work. Oh, I’d love to see the ag and green lobbies facing off against each other.

The Last Centurion takes place late ’19 and early ’20, with the election to get rid of zombie!not!Hillary in late ’20. So we’ve averted a lot of the prophecy already, just by Trump’s tougher stance butterflying away a lot of China’s bullshit that would have caused the pandemic to hit a year earlier.

Reread it back in March, and it was hilarious to see just how obviously the fictional Prez was a No Celebrities Were Harmed version of Hillary — complete with a psychological and physical collapse similar to Hillary’s response to defeat (although I have to allow that Hillary pulled herself back together enough to be present and reasonably gracious at the Inauguration, as both the defeated candidate and a former First Lady.

Depends on your state. In mine you can buy ethanol-free for highway use, albeit mostly as Premium. (Tho some 87 and 89 octane are available, mostly out in the sticks.) Almost any Cenex or Conoco has it, and a few Exxon.

Except for really old cars, it’s not legal to put non-oxy gasoline directly in the car’s tank in Oregon. OTOH, if you fill ten or so 5 gallon cans, for a bit of work, it’s doable. I keep a stash for power equipment, the boat (whenever we get to use it–IIRC it was in 2016) and generators. If need be, it’s fine in the vehicles. I go with lowtest that I get from one of the fuel terminals. The same place I get off-road diesel. Green tractors like red fuel!

I did so yesterday. rotated the Snow blower gas, and even older weed eater gas for fresh 91 R/M Premium (WI and MI have non-ethyl 91 Premium most places) and I stopped at Kwik Trip.
Gas there was $2.099 for Premium
Diesel was higher, and I forget what it was (keep 10 gallons on hand for garage heating and emergencies and used 5 this winter) Big Exxon truck stop was $2.49 this AM but is often highest place in the area, and at Kwik Trip Regular was $1.339, and their 88 (15% ethyl) was $1.319

Your neck of Oregon gone self-serve? Governor issues executive order to loosen rules to self serve at gas pumps & local Fred Meyers require self pump; per son … another month before I’ll need gas … Not like the gas prices dropped. Well gas prices did drop, but not because now gas is self pump.

I hated Iowa for my bike rides, but not as much as the ST1300 guys (Must use Premium)
Most station there I saw had like you said 87 no alky if available, 88/89 10% and Premium was often 15% alky.
15% in an ST1300 really makes the injection unhappy, and can cause other issues if long term used.
I tend to buy premium except there and got close to 45 mpg and No alky in Premium I got better, until the speed limit jumped in WI). Iowa alky or non-alky 87 was only good for about 40mpg for me, with a drop once limits jumped, and I got a heavier throttle hand.

Sigh. If only America had a powerful political leader willing to do such shocking things as delay, defer or even waive CAFE Standards (surely among the worst policy ideas any liberty-loving nation has ever implemented.)
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That’s my feeling too – that people are close to the end of their patience – and the lock-down isn’t even total, here in Texas. No one is going all Stasi about you going for several walks a day, or doing yoga in your front yard, the way I saw a family doing this week.
But if there are not massive stacks of dead bodies in the morgues by next week, I think a lot of people will begin to think, ‘f**k it, we’re going to work.”

The natives are getting restless, outside of Aust-tonio, Harris County, and the Metroplex. Our infection rate up here is slowing. *tries to cross claws, fails miserably, hides attempt* Here’s hoping Gov. Abbot decides to encourage the opening of more things.

Living in the Metroplex, I really dread going back into the office, especially since it’s in downtown Dallas.

Unless they beef up security greatly on DART and downtown, the crime situation is going to be “interesting times” soon. We are pushing to work remotely as much as possible even after this “virus” issue settles down.

Just like everybody else, muggers, burglars, drug dealers, and pimps have a backlog to get caught up on. It isn’t as if they were getting unemployment (well … many probably were; that’s why “no-sure” jobs exist.)

The bookies and loan sharks probably have knees to break, too. Were he still with us, Fezzig would be a very busy man.
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I’m seeing quite a few more vehicles on the road during my commute. And several people felt the need to come into work today – even if only for part of the day. (One commented “Boy, I got a lot more done in these three hours…”.)

“whether they manage to elect a dem-socialist this November with their new, shinny all vote by fraud mail initiative or not is irrelevant. THAT will just prolongue the pain and make life very interesting for a few years”

What they cannot imagine is how the public will react to such a steal-the-vote scheme.

Or rather, their imagined “everybody just accepting the fraud like they have in California” scenario. The public’s probable actual response is, for them, inconceivable.
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They keep confidently holding elections while telling the voters ‘you’re stupid’ and getting kicked in the nads…and not grasping why.

I think there’s a serious possibility that any fraud they set up in advance won’t be enough. I think that, even in California the stance ‘we’re the ones looking you in purgatory, letting violent felons loose, not stopping ferals from crapping in the streets, and indulging the raving nitwits who keep blocking your morning commute, vote for us’ is not a vote getter.

CA is a slightly special case as due to the population clusters in SF and LA combined with “bipartisan independent redistricting commission” gerrymandering, those two urban centers are all you need to win the state.

And as a result, those are the only places you need to pretend to spend any money on things like road maintenance and libraries and enhanced outreach to the transspecies community.

There has been a degree of ongoing simmering unrest about this across the rest of the state, with outbreaks into “State of Jefferson” separatist urges from time to time, but again, all one needs to win is SF and LA, so they can let the rubes put whatever they want on the initiative ballot.

I think the political landscape will change due to the Chinese Pandemic Which Originated In Wuhan, Which Is A City In China, where Winnie is God-Emperor. Whether the primary turn is “Waaah Nanny Didn’t Take Care Of Me Enough” (certainly not Mommy from that demographic – maybe Child-Care-Lady?), or “Well, that was Exceedingly Unpleasant – I think we need to kick the current bastards out and get a new set!” remains to be seen.

Yeah, CA is tilted by those two giant pockmarks. 2016 POTUS vote looks very different viewed by counties, or better yet precincts. (Or why an electoral college system should be in effect all the way to the bottom.)

CA is a slightly special case as due to the population clusters in SF and LA combined with “bipartisan independent redistricting commission” gerrymandering, those two urban centers are all you need to win the state.

There are lots of good pieces of info in Bill Whittle’s podcast “The Cold War: What We Saw.” Some of it is nicely bloodthirsty for the kiddies, some of it is a little shocking even to me.

The really shocking thing is that Beria actually started trying to become a benevolent dictator, when he thought he might become top dog after Stalin died. Maybe just for show, because he was even worse than I knew about, but maybe he really did want to be kulturny.

Beria was a cynical opportunist, not a True Believer. That’s why he was chosen to ramp down the Terror.

It was also why the rest of the leadership united to get rid of him once it started looking like he’d get some real power. They knew the nice face would last long enough to get his position consolidated, and then he’d start trying to remove all possible rivals. So they decided to move against him while they still could.

After the disaster that the school year has been, one might expect Oregon State U to offer discounts on tuition for next year. One would be wrong. Currently, out of the kindness of their hearts, for returning students, no increase in tuition (though there was an 11% drop in fees; hard to assess facility fees when they can’t be used). For prospective new students, a 3.2% increase.

I was starting to wonder if there were some closet conservatives infiltrating Oregon power structures. Doesn’t look like it, even after Governor Brown graciously let us keep (most of) our civil rights (far more than California. Not sure about Washington). Now, if the state R’s can get some people not part of the Permanent Bipartisan Fusion Party, we might get somewhere. Still have vote fraud by mail to cope with, though. Grr.

I’m wondering what kind of hit the Higher Ed Machine is going to take from this. Part of the selling point for signing your life away is the “campus experience”, the belief one will get to live out Animal House (while the reality is more Puritan Camp Meeting without God).

I’m not sure of the “kind”, but I’m reasonably sure of the amount. “Big.”

I can see a lot of marginal colleges going toes up or shedding major percentages of faculty and staff. Thinking of Evergreen College and Oberlin for starters. If on-line colleges take over, just imagine the hardship inflicted on the Deputy Assistant Deans of Diversity as the cash-strapped regents/board of directors realize that with no campus, Campus Life positions just aren’t worth it. Try not to smile so much, please.

There’s also the fact that there was a sort of inertia pushing HS grads into the machine. Even if you had no clue what you wanted to do, you just went along & signed the loan forms because that’s the expected next step.
This break is going to stop a lot of that inertia and group following.

I think I lot of people are asking why there needs to be large physical colleges and universities that seem to be creating massive decades of debt for all but a lucky few students. 90% of the practical course work can be done remotely and the other 10% can be simulated.

All most people need from higher education is the diploma and some skills. The 5 year indoctrination-vacation before being an adult needs to die.

“Puritan Camp Meeting without God” — I like how you think. I’ve been saying that the SJW’s are fundamentally Calvinism for atheists. They sure have Absolute Depravity down solid — but without the Irresistible Grace it becomes hell on earth.

Original Sin with no real redemption is likewise hellish.
But, as with most cults, what’s being preached on stage is often not what is being practiced, and the story pitched with such fervency to the rubes isn’t what the preacher really believes.
There’s plenty of forgiveness and acceptance for those with enough money and power willing to play along, and they are happy to give an indulgence to the rich man for doing what they damn in the poor.

not from what i’ve seen of running the college kids around as an Uber. I’ve literally run drunk college students from a frat party to a house party with about 5 otehr ubers/lyfts doing the same thing between the same two locations…

Remember the Uniparty *started* as the “Democrat-Republican Party” shortly after the Constitution was ratified.

The Uniparty’s differences are a family squabble, not a fundamental difference in political philosophy.

And I’d like to point out once again that the Parties are NGOs with no Constitutional standing, even if they’ve managed to insert themselves into the political process by order of law. In my state, you can’t even run for office unless you’re a member of “a recognized political party.” Which means the Parties determine the choices on every ballot long before a voter sees them.

Which is why nobody chose to vote the bastards in, and there’s no way to vote them out.

“I don’t care who does the votin’ as long as I do the nominatin’.” They sewed *that* one up generations ago…

There’s a difference between “No Constitutional Standing” and “Unconstitutional”.

I’d also point out that when the original “Democrat-Republican Party” started, there was also the Federalist Party. Both Parties had definite differences then.

After the Federalist Party died, the “Democrat-Republican Party” split and IIRC one of the splits became the Whigs.

The Whigs were replaced by the Republican Party.

The “Uniparty” developed later for various reasons.

While Political Parties have “No Constitutional Standing”, they are an out-growth of something very very human.

When people have different ideas about “what the government should/should not do”, then they will form organizations to promote their ideas and to elect people who share their views.

The Constitution does not mandate Political Parties but it also does not outlaw Political Parties.

And it should Not Outlaw Political Parties because such parties are a very human thing especially in a system where Government is freely chosen by the People.

I don’t doubt that the Powers-That-Be in the various States like to restrict candidates who are not part of the “existing” Parties, but Outlawing Political Parties would be Throwing The Baby Out With The Bathwater.

You forgot the Know Nothing Party, which I was taught was all about disgruntled Whigs. (Which never made sense to me.)

But actually, it was a couple of creepy Whigs In Name Only, a lot of Democrats who thought the Democratic Party was not hatey enough, and a boatload of Democratic Party money. Also, it was intended to scare Catholics and keep them “protected” by the Democratic Party.

It ended up accelerating the birth of the Republican Party, because it disgusted the nicer Democrats.

Amazing how vague some US history textbooks are about the major parties through the years, when textbooks used to go to boring lengths about the election results!

The thought of having to teach online next year horrifies me. I don’t do it well. I will do it if I have to, but I lost half my communication ability without a live audience. Could I adapt? Perhaps. Maybe I should shift away from working for Day Job and try doing individual tutoring, or adult education.

I do agree that we’re going to see attempts at political jump-scares like never before, and that even if this turns out to be an ideal crop year and no one suffers major weather-induced losses [they’re predicting drought down here. Grrrrrr], it’s going to be tight and tense. We can’t count on Canada to provide a wheat buffer like they often do.

I suspect that there’s always going to be a place for schools like St. Angus in the Grass, because some parents will always being temperamentally and schedule-wise unsuited for full time childrearing. And schools with high educational value are far less likely to see the parents pulling them out for distance learning.

I agree with the value on being able to see if a student is getting it or not, and tailoring approach. Frankly, I think that’s why a lot of distance learning hasn’t taken off before – because there’s no real substitute for being able to see whne their eyes glaze over… or when the lightbulb goes on.

I spent a bunch of years in the video-conferencing and “tele-educaction” world and came away unconvinced. It never caught on solidly, except in areas where the video content was something special, hands-on as it were. We broadcast clinical procedures from and to healthcare professional. Our lecture broadcasts of Grand Rounds were never a hit. People wanted to rub elbows.

Talking heads are really, really boring after a while. If that’s the route we go, I’d be surprised. It can be a real yawner. I’d like to know more from the student perspective, what works for them if you will. And maybe learn from some of the successful on-line MA/Ph.D programs. My step-daughter finished an Education MA on-line. We went to the graduation ceremony in Indy and there clearly was a Mr. Chips professor that the students loved. Neat trick. Good to know how he did it.

Lots to learn here by smart people willing to study and cherry-pick “best practices.” Hmmm. Maybe I should come out of retirement. LOL

Why do you need a lecture at all for most subjects? Everything is in the textbooks. The two places that video is great are demonstrations and stuff so cutting edge that there are no textbooks yet. In most cases, a prof could assign reading, assign homework and tutor by e-mail without the students ever actually seeing him.
The biggest mistake I made in college was expecting to learn from the lectures instead of learning from the textbook with a bit of tutoring to get over the parts that I didn’t get.

And I was the other way around — I needed the lectures to make the textbooks absorb properly. My college texts are full of colored notes where the Prof said something that made a light bulb come on, when just reading it did not. For most classes, I could have done without the texts entirely.

Yep, having a prof who cares about those ‘stupid questions’ can mean a lot. I still fondly recall a high school math teacher who was no great shakes as a teacher, but would bend over backwards to help any student who showed the slightest interest, and would persist until your confusion, no matter how silly, was cured.

this thread brings to mind the scene in Real Genius where the kid shows up for class and more and more students are just tape recorders, until one day the Prof included was a reel to reel running to a lecture hall full of tape recorders:

Give me the book and I’ll learn it. Have someone read the book to me in a classroom and I’ll zone out after about three seconds.

Apparently many people can *only* learn by having someone read the book out loud to them, judging from comments at various classes I’ve taken. Far too many were just sitting there for hours or days while someone laboriously read the same text it only took a few minutes to read…

I found I learned better when I moved away from textbooks but they can be useful as an overview. Some scholars do a very great service by including an annotated bibliography. Norman Cantor on the Middle Ages was the first time I really noticed. He said these are the ten books you must read and these are the next 90. I like this one, don’t like this one, and think this one is stupid. I found out that I tended to like what he didn’t and dislike what he did but still acknowledge that he did what a great teacher does. Roger Scruton did the same for philosophy.

Agreed. This never worked for me and never understood the point. Same thing with teaching. I had colleagues who taught the same thing over and over again. I had trouble repeating the 8:00 lecture again at 9:00, much less repeating from the text. Did it help that I taught writing and lit, that you had to work to make those things accessible and interesting? Possibly.

I do a LOT of video learning right now, between my job and some skills I’ve been trying to learn for my own edification. And there are presentations that I will be asleep by the end of a 3 minute video, and others where I can watch for 20-30 minutes at a shot and actually learn.

Some of it is the subject matter, some of it is the presenter (i.e., I can only listen to the thick Indian accent for so long before losing focus), some of it is things like method of presentation (talk, type with silence…….., talk vs talk while typing). Live is often better than pre-recorded.

One of the hardest bits to video learning is when you can’t follow along step-for-step in your own lab/application. And that’s even harder if you don’t have multiple screens you can use.

Norway, Denmark, Austria and Czech Republic have begun to reopen. Press, of course, is hyperventilating about Singapore and Japan second wave, but we know what the death rates are now and the treatments do seem to be working.

The education thing interests me. On the one hand less bullying on the other some will be getting no education at all. I’d be interested in the results in Mathematics since I’ve long believed it can only be tutored, not taught since students get stuck on different things and once the class moves on they never catch up. Number 2 son ended up being homeschooled for 9th grade, long sad story worked out in the end, and we went all the way back to counting. Fractions were a mess, we spent weeks doing problem after problem. He cracked that and never looked back. In a class, you can’t do that and there’s always one kid that gets it.

The Peoples Republic of New Jersey is too busy stamping even harder with its boot. Today they declared all State and County Parks closed; because being outside in wide open spaces is now deemed to be dangerous…because…..no logical reason why.

Meanwhile they seem intent on putting people who do not obey the ever more draconian measures in jail while they are busy releasing convicted felons. Apparently they have decided that the space needs to be used for political prisoners rather than actual criminals.

because being outside in wide open spaces is now deemed to be dangerous…because…..
Because you have to travel to get there! Duh. And the virus can only spread if it travels, right? And you don’t want to infect your State and County Parks, do you? You must be an Earth-h8r.

Spme of them are getting worse than no education; they are getting the Howard Zinn Marxist indoctrination curriculum. Unfortunately there is an on-line version of it that some schools are using for their on-line “stay at home” sessions.

Looking at local headlines — “Revised forecast shows 500,000 fewer North Carolinians may be infected by COVID-19 by June 1 if social restrictions remain in place” — I foresee a reprise of the prior administration’s claims about “Jobs Created Or Saved.”

Vastly over-stated models make claims of saved lives more credible.

Not credible, just more credible. There will always be a number who bite on that hook.
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in the you can’t make this stuff up category it out that NYC had built a stockpile of ventilators and N95 masks because of a study done under Bloomberg. The city under that idiot DeBlassio auctioned them off. It’s in propublica which is definitely not a right wing source.

Historically NYC has been lucky because the heads of its critical services, police, fire, etc., have been competent. They might be corrupt but they also had to be competent. From what I’ve been told, Chicago under Daley was the same. Chicago has been a mess for a long time and it seems that N.Y. has become one. What a disgrace.

Was the same in ca. Guvernator had built up a response group including mobile icus, vents, etc. Brown iirc got rid of them because too expensive (this is part of the issue. Once these stockpiles made items do expire. Number of states got n95s in this that were expired or even dry rotted)

I have to say that suspending construction of the railway but at the same time keeping on all the lawyers, environmental analysts, and other assorted politically valuable drones was a piece of perverse genius. Someone posted here the Yes Minister clip of the hospital with administrators and no patients, here — hold my beer — we have administrators with no tracks or trains never mind passengers.

New York, back in the days of Tamany Hall established the principle of “Honest Graft.” You overpaid but what was delivered was good quality. Dishonest graft s the worst of both worlds — you overpay and what gets doe isn’t worth buying: shoddy workmanship, poor materials, incompetent performance.

I STRONGLY recommend a viewing of the Preston Sturgess film The Great McGinty for a useful tutorial on how politics really works. Brian Donlevy surpasses his Oscar nominated ( Best Supporting Actor) performance as Fort Zinderneuf’s sadistic Sgt. Markoff and is ably matched by Akim Tamiroff’s portrait of a political boss.

Two samples of its perspective:

Skeeters: What do you think this is, Hicks Corners? Some people is too lazy to vote, that’s all. They don’t like this kind of weather. Some of ’em is sick in bed and can’t vote. Maybe a couple of ’em croaked recently. That ain’t no reason why Mayor Tillinghast should get cheated out of their support. All we’re doing is getting out the vote.

AND

Skeeters: If it wasn’t for graft, you’d get a very low type of people in politics. Men without ambition. Jellyfish.

Catherine: Especially since you can’t rob the people anyway.

Skeeters: Sure. How was that?

Catherine: What you rob, you spend, and what you spend goes back to the people. So, where’s the robbery? I read that in one of my father’s books.

Just so. I must declare an interest, my great grandfather, grandfather, assorted cousins, two of my brothers-in-law, four nephews, most of my friends’ fathers growing up and a fair number of my friends were or are in the NYPD. Patrolmen up to Inspectors and at least two Chiefs of Police. Father in Law did three times around, 60+ years, either in uniform and civilian for the FDNY. And again, wife’s grandfather, cousins, uncles all cops and firemen. We’re a walking irish stereotype.

It was always Byzantine and there were always do gooders from upstate trying to clean it up but it worked. Now, not to sound like Hannitty, the rank and file still run toward the fire but there has been a steady decline since the progressives took over and moved away from people’s causes to rich peoples problems. i suppose thats populist, but I’m no patrician so why should I care about their problems,, pronouns, safe spaces, and other assorted BS.

Mike Royko’s book Boss was a good political biography of Richard J. (I don’t know much about the son, was gone long before he was on the scene. I read it a long time ago.

I don’t know if Daley ever got rich off of his position. I know a fair number of aldermen did, somewhat before getting a stay in the greybar hotel, but AFAIK, Daley was more into power than flaunting the benefits from it.

Da Mare insisted that a) don’t sleep with your secretary, and b) don’t let the corruption interfere with city services, at least not where people might use their brains to vote. The expressways (California would call them freeways) got repaved by the contractors who gave the best kickbacks, but they actually got done in Chicago. Then. My last time there was quite painful from bad roads.

Getting rich off such a position is stupid. The perquisites of office provide all of the benefits of being rich without the inconvenience of taxes. Money’s utility is that it can buy power, but if you’ve got power (and are confident of keeping it) money simply draws unwonted attention.

This is the principle underlying most Not-For-Profit scams, in which the principle’s expenses are all paid by the organization while they “earn” a modest salary and generous pension. What tends to get over-looked is that “modest” salary is all gravy given all living expenses are paid for them. It is an organizational necessity that the principle officers dress to impress and hold fundraising events so the Not-For-Profit provides generous clothing allowances, lavish entertainment budgets and living quarters suitable to the priciples’ status.
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Getting rich off such a position is stupid. The perquisites of office provide all of the benefits of being rich without the inconvenience of taxes.

Strangely, that’s a lesson several Illinois governors never learned, though I also suspect they skipped taxes, too. Without trying hard, I can recall 4 governors from the late 60s onward who transitioned from the governor’s mansion to The Big House, though at least one was a federal judge in the interim. I haven’t paid close attention since the 70s, so I might have missed a few. 🙂

Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t Illinois governors term-limited? Unlike Chicago mayors (during Daley’s reign, at any rate.) It is probably easier to control a city than a state, and it might be acknowledged that many a political boss never held significant office, preferring others for that purpose.

It seems odd to me that, so far as I’ve been able to determine the nation has seen only a single Republican-run political machine (Philadelphia, from the 1850s until FDR’s first reelection.) I guess that’s why they’re called the Stupid party.
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I have to plead ignorance about Illinois term limits. They redid the state constitution in my college years, and it was just taking effect when I graduated. I was too busy drinking and studying (the latter dominated after a rough Freshman semester…) to pay much attention to IL government.

For a fairly long time, the suburban portion of Cook County (Chicago’s county) had enough Rs to partially balance the statewide politics. Not sure when it changed, but the entire county went Dem, and the Blue Rot has been spreading. We had a decent R governor when I was in college, but the state income tax took effect in his term, and that killed any chances he had. Now, I think the governor is as likely to be handpicked by the Chicago Machine as to be a downstate R, and the state legislature seems pretty Democrat.

If you go to the new City Hall in NY (old city hall is on Wall Street and was Washington’s home when he was president) you’ll find behind it a somewhat decayed classical building called the Tweed courthouse, yep Boss Tweed whom Thomas Nast went after. Cost at least twice what it should have done but it’s still there and still functions over 100 years after it was built.

It’s odd to find myself nostalgic for Tammany since they were thieves, but they were so much more competent than the current crowd. I think it’s the communism thing, it appeals to theory and allows people to justify keeping people poor and miserable for the sake of the revolution. It’s truly an inversion of morality.

Yes … Chicago critical services are riddled with “merit” promotions, individuals boosted into position by some politico or other. Chicago PD has real problems with incompetent management. While the fish rots, kind of thing, many CPD officers remain basically good guys. Of course, the media have made them punching bags. The core veterans, solid service and street savvy, have either retired or are counting down the days.

I’m actually looking forward, in a way, to the return of pronoun moonbattery. That’s a first world problem, a luxury allowed us because of our immense wealth and the safety net that builds for us. Their talking about pronouns will mean we’re back to normal. At the end of them day, it’s easy to tune out the EDPs who push that nonsense and not so easy to tune out the jackbooted thugs who have put the country under house arrest.

Oh I think it’ll be quicker than that. These people are so self absorbed that they can’t wait to get back to the important stuff.

Riddle me this though, how come all the bearded men on TV talk like girls? Not women, girls. it used to be that the men on TV had baritone voices and heads that were large relative to their shoulders. Now they’re all altos with uptalk, vocal fry, and beards. The vapidity endures though.

If you want to advance in most professions, you have to sound “metrosexual” and non threatening. Younger son can’t even if he wanted to. He has one of THOSE voices. But I can see older son do it the moment he’s “on” in public/professional setting. it’s weird..

Because they’re scared of men. That’s the truth of modern feminism.
Older son sounds completely normal around us, but catch him in a public situation…
Young son booms. ALL THE TIME. Fortunately he’s going to be an engineer. (rolls eyes.)

If he doesn’t already have it, point him at Colin Kapp’s “The Unorthodox Engineers.” They were a series of short stories written for British SF mags in the ’50s and ’60s, then a quite-rare anthology, but now available as an ebook from the Amazon-borg.

The UEs were the ones even the Odds made wide shuffling circles around, that the brass threw at problems too bizarre for ordinary measures.

Modern feminists are, generally, remarkably unattractive women (it is not innate, although few are “pretty” — but their inner selves express unbeautifully) which eliminates the standard toolbox by which women manage men. The tools they have — Queen Bee Syndrome — are not especially effective with men.

These are women who fear what they cannot control. What they fear must be destroyed, in large part because they cannot acknowledge that their fear is internal and only reflects back from the objects of their dread.
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For #1 – more work from home, I can offer a counter anecdote.
For two years before 9/11 I was working [for the Bank of New York] from home on a software development team – with team members scattered across several states. We met in person [except for the database guy in Tennessee – he was on a speakerphone] every eight weeks or so.

The week after 9/11, the Bank’s Chief Technology Officer decreed that all telecommuting would end. I guess she was looking to present a more concentrated target

I’m thinking that if people are allowed to keep telecommuting, that many folks will figure out that they don’t need to live in a big city to do their jobs…the folks that will be doing that are going to be the ones that were like iw as in L.A> county- where you vote and write your congresscritters even tho you know its futile because the Dem/Union machine will just ignore you and trundle on…

I almost got a chocolate bunny the other day when I went to the Drugs-n-health-Food-n-stuff store on Sunday afternoon. But I opted for a Cadbury™ egg instead, just because it’s not Easter until I remind myself why I don’t like the US version of the things. My blood sugar might come back down by Good Friday. 😀

Yeah, word was that when the local PD rolled up to order the gun stores hereabouts to close up or else, those lines out the door were all left-leaning Democratic voter newbies to owning guns, who were much put out at what their decades of loyal party-line votes had wrought.

For those in free states, CA has a ten day “cooling off” period, a one-handgun-per-month limit, and a sparsely populated state-allowed-handgun list limiting what can be sold here, in addition to both state and Federal background checks for prohibited person status, all of which does not align with the stories in the mainstream press all these years about how easy it is to buy a firearm, which in just about any crisis situation yields stories like this:

Regarding the difference between wealth and money, it’s really fairly simple.
Money is just a convenient medium of exchange for real wealth, a way to keep score if you will.
And most money is ones and zeros on computers, not actual bills or coins.
Now true wealth is either material goods or actual labor. And both of those are highly variable and their real value is set by the market.
Goods are worth what a buyer is willing to pay the seller. And their value can change for a number of reasons. I think it was Heinlein who remarked that a decent cook could take a set of ingredients and turn them into a tasty meal, while a bad cook could take those same items and create inedible slop.
Similarly with labor, an hour of one’s time has value. In part that value depends on the utility of one’s skill set. An hour from a new hire as yet untrained for useful work does not have the same value as that same period of time from a skilled worker with years of experience. Or from someone with very specialized training, medical personnel for example.
In short, when governments create money out of thin air they are jiggering with the means of keeping score. The results are what we commonly call inflation, either an incremental change in our system of value, or in its extreme the sort of run away inflation where ultimately a bank note is quite literally not worth the paper it’s printed on.

That will very much depend on the outcome of our little exercise in citizenship come this November.
With a second term of Trump I expect we will see government mandated US based manufacturing for all essential critical goods from pharmaceuticals to critical military equipment and spare parts.
Same for open borders. We all know how Mr. Trump feels about that.
Now should Uncle Joe, Bernie, or a designated hitter still to be named finagle their way into office with the help of massive vote fraud and a complicit media, then all bets are off.
Eight years of Obama had this country poised on a precipice, ready to slide into mediocrity and the total loss of American exceptionalism. Hillary would have signed, sealed, and delivered us into a globalist hell in which our hard work earned over the years would have been plucked and handed over to the “more deserving” of the world. With just a smidge skimmed off to ensure that our betters, overseeing the fairness of it all of course, got a bit of reward for their efforts. After all vacation Dachas and special party only stores worked ever so well during the glory days of the USSR didn’t they.
Seriously, they try to steal the election, or flim flam us into another round of red diaper baby carp, and there truly will be blood in the streets and bodies hung from lampposts.

Not just final assembly, but the component piece parts that go into nearly every electronic device sold in the USA. Smart companies are even as we speak taking a very hard look at their entire supply chains from raw materials to finished goods.

If we brought chip manufacturing back to the U.S. that would help immensely. Of course, they’d have to cut back on some of the environmental regulations — not the pollution itself, but the insane reporting and paperwork requirements. Companies have to maintain an entire department just to fill out the fucking forms. And then the government has to maintain an entire department to read them. None of those people add ANY value to the economy.
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There is nothing so simple the government can’t fuck it up.

The greater concern is the way China Fever has its hooks in such American “News” manufacturers as ABC/ESPN (Disney) and NBC/CNBC/MSNBC (Comcast-Universal), playing their eagerness for theme parks and film distribution against their hesitancy about doing anything to offend their Chinese “partners.”

Comforting the powerful seems to be the operative principle for those seeing to cozen the Far East.
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Not without substantial changes in Federal regulations. On the one side, you have regulation and taxation; on the other, multiple agencies who exist to help you offshore your production, from banking to language and shipping assistance.

That has to change. You can’t run a business making widgets for $10 when your competitor, with Federal assistance, is bringing them in from overseas at $2.50. It’s not a free market; and you’re not going to sell many $10 widgets no matter how patriotic people are.

This White House seems to have a goal of bringing back manufacturing and certainly seems to grasp the strangling effect of regulatory kudzu. Look for some type of relief in the next “stimulus” tranche — a stimulus supposedly targeting small business, a sector notoriously challenged by regulatory issues.

As for state regulations, I understand that Texas is happy to welcome businesses fleeing excessive regulatory burdens and I’ve no doubt there are other states willing to trust businesses to manage their activity without government nanny-sight.
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And also note the conflict between the obligatory disclaimer from the Ministry of Truth KTLA tweet that “The data is dependent on continued adherence to social distancing guidelines through the end of May” and what the “experts” have told us all along about the lockdown only being put in place to flatten the curve, stringing out the exact same number of infections, critical hospitalizations, and deaths over a longer period so as to not overwhelm medical resources.

Naturally an overwhelmed health care system would result in more deaths due to not getting meds or a respirator – but more than 4,300?

The models stink but the lies, oh the lies. Funny how it’s always the same crowd with the same threats and the same results saying we must surrender to them or die. I hate these people, I really do. I’ve never hated anyone before, not really, but I do now.

Not going to happen, but I’d be interested in how the publicly published models match developed by public health types up to the ones used for BIOWAR exercises and planning using the same inputs. It would also be interesting to see how the .mil models match up to actual results.

1. People are getting a good look at just how heavy the lead millstone of Federal regulation really is. The FDA has a long, well-earned reputation for being sluggish in approving medications, treatments, and medical hardware. Industry can do much better.

And that lead millstone permeates the ENTIRE economy. Lift it, and we can come out ahead of the game. There’s a brief window where real reform is possible, let’s seize it.

2. The medical models in use are garbage. Frankly, I don’t have a good feeling that these physicians have any knowledge of math beyond algebra and elementary statistics. And their models show it. One thing I’d be doing were I President would be to bring in a team of engineers capable of doing real math modeling…and of updating those models in near real time as data comes in.

Note that this may ultimately demand a shift in the way that doctors are trained. Engineers of all types start to get instruction in their specialty about midway through their sophomore year. Perhaps it’s time to train physicians as specialists from the outset…and if you are studying public health issues, expect a heavy load in higher math. You WILL know what a Kalman Filter is…

3. The mask is off China. The PRC is hostile. And ALL the civilized world knows this. They are in big trouble. Expect trouble in the 2020s. Pro tip – Watch Russia. If the Russians turn on China, they are really toast. China relies on Russian technology to prop up their military capabilities. Strip them of that support, and Chinese fighting power will decline significantly. They will still be a problem, but not nearly the problem they would be otherwise.

I’d add that I expect to see a decline in big city living, especially in places like Chicago where the 30-somethings have moved downtown for the “excitement of it all.” When this is over, they’ll probably be looking for a whole less excitement … and a backyard they can spend time in as opposed to their 900 sq ft box apartments. I can’t imagine 5 weeks of living like that.

Maybe? But I don’t think so.
This is what we thought before the oughts, but it’s proven otherwise.
People who work indoors/at home need more people afterwards. And young singles will congregate in city centers.
Now places like Chicago….

I’m on the fence with all of this. Our kids moved from true downtown Chicago out to the nearby burbs a few years back and they’ve adapted their socializing to a mix of stuff. Sometimes they go back into the City, sometimes they stay local. But they’re pretty clear they wouldn’t move back … I’ve seen the same thing with colleagues in their 30’s as they go thru the marriage – children – schooling cycle. They pretty much all say they’d never leave the City … and then they do when the kids get to be 4 or 5. Some of that may be specific to Chicago. I guess I stuck wondering how the experience of being hard quarantined will play into their housing choices. Maybe that’s what’s nagging at me.

On another group I read, one of the commenters in Texas mentions that the young couples love the city life until they have kids who reach school age. Then they want to live in a good school district, so they ditch the city for the best suburbs they can afford.

TB? Tuberculosis? TB has always been endemic to humans living in crowded spaces, so it’s not something that has ever come, hit hard as a unique circumstance, and then left. As such, it’s just an endemic hazard like drunk drivers, and the culture doesn’t even notice.

What started the massive drive for the suburbs was the availability of the motor car. PEople go where the work is, and the work was in the urban areas – but the auto mobile made it possible to leave the city behind, and go to the brand new housing with its own bit of land that waren’t quite urban, definitely wasn’t rural, they were sort of sub-urban. From whence cometh the word – suburbs.

This is why the suburbs are a very 20th-century phenomenon. Not that they didn’t exist to some extent on the ring outside every city before, but the tranformation of the verb commute from the 1600s meaning of “to echange one burden for another” into the commutation ticket of the 1800’s streetcars for workers traveling across the city instead of living within walking distance of the factory, to the 1970’s “commuter” on the “freeways”… has been a very sudden, very rapid societal upheaval.

With the ability of teleworking, we’ve seen the early excesses with the young kids taking off all over the world as expats while still turning in their work, and the massive erosion of “take the day off” with the expectation of answering work calls and emails on off days and vacations. I’m still trying to see how it will shake out – but I won’t be surprised if the ability to turn off your phone / not answer work emails, and have work/life seperation becomes a more valued feature in jobs, even as the proximity decreases.

Agreed on the whole “taking the day off” thing. Our son-in-law is pretty much constantly connected: phone, watch, email. Drives his bride a bit batty. So the boundary between work and home has really broken down. It did for me as well, before retirement but that went with the IT support territory. Not sure at all how the kids will manage it.

One odd footnote … I learned that many of the 30-somethings don’t read/respond to email reliably. They’ll respond to texts, but send them an email and it will go unanswered for days. To me, that’s just plain weird.

And the amusing ‘study’ a few years back that claimed that proper Capitalization, spelling, and punctuation in text-messages indicated one was a “monster.” Well, damn, that whole ‘monster’ qualification thing REALLY lowered its standards! And, why yes, I do qualify. And I don’t “speak” emoji – heck, I’ve no idea what most them are supposed to mean. I find them not only bewildering, but too often just plain ugly.

It’s all part of the left’s war on literacy. If nobody can read, they will be easier to rule. I’ve been saying that since they started replacing words with pictures on warning signs. Anybody that can’t read “NO PASSING ZONE” or “SLOW FOR CURVE” shouldn’t be driving.

The left believes everybody is as stupid as they are, so we must all be treated like idiots.
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You’re a violation of the laws of nature — but I don’t enforce them laws.

So, you’re one of those Grammar-Normative h8ers? Not everybody enjoys the same privileged background as you, you know? Just because some people were raised by wolvescoyotes feral chipmunks is No Reason to deny their right to pay dues to a teachers union..
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No, I just have a bunch of them, and pick whatever sounds funny or topical at the moment. That one is a quote from ‘Every Which Way But Loose’ that fit with those lefty idiots.
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Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!!

Suburbs are actually a late 19th century phenomena, even if the 20th did see the greatest explosion of them. The steam railroads offered the upper and upper middle classes the opportunity to move out of the big cities well before the turn of the century. Later streetcars and elevated railroads extended that privilege to the portions of the rest of the middle class, and some of the working class. There was a limit to how far out streetcars and elevateds could profitably extend service, however. So it took the automobile, and a massive expenditure of public money on paving, for the suburbs to really explode.

Pretty much what Imaginos said– the travel demands were there, then the money was taken to make it easier to fulfill those traffic demands because it was really, really good for the cities.

STARTING with how much easier it was for customers and wares to get into said city!

There’s some nasty revisionistic stuff going around about the idea of roads outside of town being a subsidy for not-in-the-city people. (Because, of course, CITY roads are a totally natural phenomina like frost, and are only just and right…)

The decision to build highways out to Long Island was very deliberate and designed to keep the riff raff out. The old Pennsylvania Railroad built lines in Long Island over 100 years ago and that’s basically what they have now. Robert Moses was the culprit as he was in so much of what went on in NY after the war.

Long Island is one of the first planned mass suburbs in the US. That’s where Levittown, the story of Long Island is this story of the US suburb. The modern US suburb is largely a function of the GI Bill and the VA mortgages that came with it. People moved out of the city into the Levittown Cape Cod houses. They built roads instead of trains because they wanted to encourage cars. This was all quite deliberately done.

Trump’s father had a bit of that but more in Outer Brooklyn and Queens, which are on Long Island. These developments were made possible by the building of car only highways that went to them.

All this was built by state money under the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority (TBTA) run by Robert Moses.

No mass transit ever went out to the outer boroughs and suburbs beyond what might have existed before the war other than some busses. We call it living in a two fare zone.

If it was a planned suburb, isn’t it kind of circular that the route to it was also planned?

I can see some definitions of it working with that meaning, but in this discussion it’s not that one– the buildup predates the Great Depression, much less WWII, and poking around it looks like it was a notably big thing in the mid-west.

Heh, went to see if the dictionary would be any help, it’s literally from the 14th century. 😆

First Known Use of suburb
14th century, in the meaning defined at sense 1a

I can definitely understand having a love for a subject, I just couldn’t figure out what on earth it had to do with it!
Hm, maybe that there *was* transit heading sort-of out is one of those rather old and overbuilt areas things? New York is pretty dang old, after all, it had already expanded out to a lot of the decent to build on areas that were still close enough to work at the economic centers like the harbor so the demands are different.

The book, The Crabgrass Frontier by Kenneth T. Jackson is a good overview of how ubs became suburbs. Note: He’s a big fan of living in the city, not suburbs, and some of his stuff on red-lining and so on is out-dated and not 100% correct.

I remember the adults in Ireland worrying about TB when we were teens spending time in crowded, closed rooms.

The thing I’ve noticed about working from home is how much time at work is just Brownian motion. I’ve been getting through immense quantities of work. What’s missing is the casual contact. I think we overlook the importance of chance encounters. Much as youre more likely to come across something interesting that you’d didn’t already know browsing a used book shop than you are searching online, so much innovation comes from a chance contact or remark that triggers a reaction. That’s what cities do. I’m a big fan of Jane Jacobs and her Nature of Economies lays all this out.

I saw something similar with TB my home state growing up. Parents were concerned about largish groups, but then we saw something similar with Scarlet/Rheumatic Fever. So possibly suffering from aging memories here.

I had scarlet fever, it was endemic in Ireland They wouldn’t pay the guinea (21 shillings or about $5 in 1966.) to the doctor so I almost died. My mother saw nothing odd about it. My father who was American born, went wild when he found out. I’m told it was the closest my parents came to divorce.

My Wisconsin kindergarten went so far as to send home ALL my possessions, telling us they might spread contagion. Afterwards, I wondered if they were wondering if I’d ever come back. I was fortunate to have a mild case and did fine.

Your Mom was a tough old gal, it sounds like. While I understand your Dad’s response, there was probably something in her that I would have liked.

but I get the same effect as browsing bookstores from, say, this blog’s comments, and I get the same innovation from my “office mates” online, that is the people I talk to everyday.
Maybe start a similar group?

Look up Stuart Slade’s “Nuclear Warfare 102” essay sometime.
Short answer- despite all the doom saying about “destroy the world x times over”, there’s only so many weapons, and the number of weapons needed per target is a bit more than one thinks it is. Plus you can’t count on all your devices reaching the target, or destroying your target if they get there, so you got to assign multiple devices to get what you need to get.
It’s interesting reading.

Yeah. I remember a nuclear disarmament film by Physicians for Social Reprehensibility that showed the estimated casualties and estimated damage rings if the Sov’s dropped a multi-megaton nuke on San Francisco. Saw it at a “community meeting” My first question of why would anyone waste a multi-megaton nuke on SF when a few hundred kiloton airburst over Alemeda NAS would be sufficient for a counter force strike wasn’t received well. It went down hill (for them) from there. (The entertainment value however was priceless).

When I was supporting the Wing Command Post at Offutt AFB (home of SAC headquarters) the plan for us junior officers sitting on the outer ring of chairs was to head for the Playboy Club on first warning and put everything on our credit cards…

Uncle (by marriage) was a comms guy on Looking Glass (says NOTHING more than that – hell, he barely talks about anything, even non-mil) and when once upon a time Pa gave him a ride in a light plane (Cessna 150, I think) he was *THRILLED* – he got to fly AND LOOK OUT THE WINDOWS!

or pediatrics. i’m really tired of people praising my governor ‘because he’s a doctor and he knows’… his knowledge of statistical modeling of pandemics is basically limited to snot-nosed brats spreading this year’s cold in his waiting room.

Frankly, I don’t have a good feeling that these physicians have any knowledge of math beyond algebra and elementary statistics.
It’s not the math. It’s the assumptions. The folks building the models are the same sorts of folks who believe that you can eliminate playground injuries if you just eliminate the playground. The same ones who brought us the national 55mph speed limit. The ones who freaked about vaping. Zero Risk/Tolerance.

When you start with those sorts of assumptions, the math doesn’t matter that much.

Agree that the models are garbage, but as we’ve discussed before, it doesn’t really matter since the data are garbage. Better models really wouldn’t help when we have no clue how many people are infected, how many were infected, or how many have actually died from WuFlu, vs. how many died WuFlu adjacent.

I’m thinkin’ bored kids ‘wasting their time’ out of school might be attracted by the trades, if offered a chance to get their hands dirty. Frex, let whoever wants to work on that dead car behind the shop, only rule being they have to return any tools they borrow, and if they get it running, it’s theirs to keep (or share in sale proceeds, as the case may be). Could attract some pretty good working prospects that way, methinks. IOW, don’t hire ’em; rather, let them choose to become apprentices and prove themselves, which would also do wonders for their sense of self.

Our son is 13 years out of HS. But last we heard was his HS still had their “shop like” class. Output from each year by crews, assigned first year, self assigned subsequent years, is an Electric Cart. Son’s group got their carts ready for racing all years he participated before last race of the spring season … which is the Portland, Oregon Raceway. He triple earned his “Letter” … first time by coming in 1st through 3rd in 5 races driving a cart. Repeated that the next year, plus the cart his team built came in 1st through 3rd regardless of driver. He was particularly proud of that one, because it allowed a team member to earn a letter. The team made a vehicle this person could drive which made it less aerodynamic & sturdy to accommodate a larger person and well over the minimum weight requirement. The minimum weight requirement was one of the reasons son drove every race he was able to attend, which was most of them. His maximum weight in HS was 160. Minimum weight was 180. For his team to explicitly build a cart so the person on his team, who otherwise wouldn’t get a chance to participate in an actual race, could drive it, was unheard of. Our response was “good for your team!!!” Taught him whatever he did meant working with his hands. Which technically lab work would have done. Hasn’t worked that way … but he is working so …

Went down around zero in Montana last week (well, we had April in January, so I guess it was only fair…) tho has since come back to normal. Usually my excessively hardy Nanking Cherry is all done blooming by now… this year it’s just barely started budding up. Must know something we don’t.

Like they did here at a warehouse grocery store. In order to ‘protect’ us from catching a cold while waiting in line at the checkouts, they made us wait in a longer line outdoors in the rain. Genius, sheer genius.
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People can make stupid mistakes on their own, but only the government can force everybody to make the SAME stupid mistakes.

Unless somebody succumbs to the urge, while waiting in line, to call the Fire Inspector Office and register a complaint. One element of the codes being in conflict is that citizens can start jurisdictional battle even without an apple of Eris.
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One of the surviving local golf coarse was swamped. To be fair, this has been happening before this mess, as other venues closed or jacked prices. BUT it is one of the few outdoor activities not cutoff by our wonderful state government (or snow).

Last night was fun. The weather was beautiful, so I sat out and had a nice beer.

The neighbors had two minivans of visitors, but they sort of did a social distancing shuffle where they were all outside, there were never more than five people or kids together at the same time, and most people didn’t touch. The kids ran around like crazy in the grass. I just sat there on my own strip of concrete, and did my own thing and drank my beer. When it got chilly, I changed to long pants and put on a sweater, and continued to sit outside long after everybody else left.

One of the other neighbors have been doing a thing where they have visitors come over at night and park in our unused apartment parking spaces, and then leave later at night. This hasn’t been happening lately, so maybe they switched gathering spaces. Not my worry.

The worrying neighbor was the one on the other side, who had a dry cough that I was hearing through the wall for the last week or so. He/she seems to be better. (Hurray for separate townhouses!)

I suspect there will be tons of shoppers up until Easter/Passover. People are really thinking about it now. Pentecost and the summer holy days are probably going to be bigger in people’s minds, too.

(Oh, and fun fact for the day? The Lebar Brecc has a list of vestment colors with their early medieval Irish associations. It wasn’t green for Ordinary Time; they associated green vestments with non-funeral prayers for the dead — it was the priest looking like a grave under the grass! Hahahah, gotta love that Irish optimism. And I love it when symbolism changes across time!)

I found an old medical paper on JSTOR (J.F.D. Shrewsbury, “The Yellow Plague,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Vol. 4, No. 1, Winter 1949, pp. 5-47.) where the author argues that the Yellow Plague in the British Isles back in the early medieval period was actually smallpox. There was a bad symptom of smallpox called “confluent variola” where your body turns yellow with all the ick; and that usually showed up in “virgin populations,” like Indian tribes right after European colonization.

(He goes through all the known diseases that make you yellow and can kill you, although of course it is possible that it was a disease that just burned itself out and disappeared. But his argument is convincing. Then he argues that the bolgach and samhthrusc diseases in the annals are other presentations of the smallpox that don’t kill you.)

It’s also interesting because he points out that Europe really didn’t have rats until the 1100’s, 1200’s, etc. Mice, yes. Rats, no. The rat names are “new.”

Rats came from China and Mongolia with the silk and spice trades. They were kept isolated by high mountains until boats started traveling between China, India and the Middle East. From there, they spread by foot — horse, camel and rat feet. The ‘Norway rat’ should be called the Mongolian rat.

In other news the last SpaceX Cargo Dragon version 1 capsule successfully was unberthed from the International Space Station, deorbited and re-entered Earth’s atmosphere, and “six hours after leaving the space station, Dragon splashed down in the Pacific Ocean just off the coast from Long Beach, California.”

Long Beach lifeguards, harbor police and County Sheriffs Deputies immediately arrested the Dragon capsule for breaking the Gavin Newsom Imperial Stay At Home Edict by entering the Pacific Ocean.

boy have they tried to prolong the shut down and the misery
I’m convinced the sudden interest in mask protocols (pushing for everyone to wear a mask – even the military might soon make it mandatory) is primarily to extend the panic a but longer.

I’m still wondering what happens when China money dries up, and how many more masks will fall.

Yes. But not only China. A LOT of influence operations fly through the transom at institutions of “higher” learning. And that will likely go by the wayside as the children are brought home to attend classes in their mom’s basement. And the money for it will dry up as well.